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Melting Sun
- The History of Nuclear Power in Japan and the Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi
- Narrated by: Nick Gallagher
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
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Publisher's summary
Almost 24 hours to the minute since the tsunami hit Fukushima Daiichi, Unit 1 exploded. The building wrenched apart, sending shards of irradiated concrete and metal knifing through the air in all directions. The reactor’s massive heavy-duty gantry crane bent like a twig and collapsed onto the refueling floor control room, crushing everything that wasn’t expelled in the blast. Outside, chunks of debris rained down on the fire crew, injuring five and shredding the hoses they had just laid. Among the injured was the plant’s own fire chief, whose arm snapped when a piece of steel hurtled through the window.
In March 2011, a 15-metre tsunami wiped out long stretches of Japanese coastline, killing thousands. Flooded cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant failed as hundreds of men and women battled to save three reactors from destruction in what became the most expensive industrial accident of all time.
Melting Sun spans 150 years of little-known history to retell how Japan evolved from the first victim of atomic energy to its most passionate supporter. It is a story of innovation and determination, but also of collusion, deception, overconfidence, failure, and ultimately, death. From a nuclear ship stranded at sea after leaking radiation on its maiden voyage and to the unimaginable final days of two men treated for extreme overexposure, to Fukushima itself - the only accident comparable with the infamous Chernobyl disaster.
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- Unabridged
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Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly - or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than 25 years.
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Beware limitations of the reader
- By JFanson on 01-01-19
By: Richard Rhodes
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Simply Electrifying
- The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk
- By: Craig R. Roach
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.
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decent, but ended up disappointing.
- By Alexander Douglass on 12-28-18
By: Craig R. Roach
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The Quest
- Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
- By: Daniel Yergin
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 29 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Prize. In The Quest, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change and conflict, in a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. The Quest tells the inside stories, tackles the tough questions, and reveals surprising insights about coal, electricity, and natural gas.
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Best nonfiction book of 2011
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Daniel Yergin
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Midnight in Chernobyl
- By: Adam Higginbotham
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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April 25, 1986 in Chernobyl was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.
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Midnight in Chernobyl is the book to listen to.
- By NH on 03-21-19
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The Alchemy of Air
- A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.
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Great Book Thoroughly Researched
- By Terry A. Gray on 10-21-11
By: Thomas Hager
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Private Empire
- ExxonMobil and American Power
- By: Steve Coll
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobil’s annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than almost any other corporation. Yet despite its outsized influence, it is a black box.
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Please no more accents!
- By Zak on 07-24-12
By: Steve Coll
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Burning the Sky
- Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space
- By: Mark Wolverton
- Narrated by: John Lescault
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After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.
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Extraordinary interesting history
- By Magnus Almgren on 10-23-20
By: Mark Wolverton
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Admiral Hyman Rickover
- Engineer of Power (The Jewish Lives Series)
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- Narrated by: Paul Bellantoni
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Admiral Hyman George Rickover (1899-1986) remains an almost mythical figure in the United States Navy. A brilliant engineer with a ferocious will and combative personality, he oversaw the invention of the world’s first practical nuclear power reactor. In this exciting biography, historian Marc Wortman explores the constant conflict Rickover faced and provoked, tracing how he revolutionized the navy and Cold War strategy.
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Rickover - No Compromises
- By Brustar on 07-18-22
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Command and Control
- Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
- By: Eric Schlosser
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 20 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved - and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind.
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A miracle that we escaped the Cold War alive....
- By A reader on 02-16-14
By: Eric Schlosser
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The Great Oil Conspiracy
- How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People
- By: Jerome R. Corsi
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process” - a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed. When the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves.
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Complete and total waste of time
- By Dustin on 07-25-14
By: Jerome R. Corsi
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Adapt
- Why Success Always Starts with Failure
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
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In this groundbreaking work, Tim Harford shows us a new and inspiring approach to solving the most pressing problems in our lives. Harford argues that today’s challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt. Deftly weaving together psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, physics, and economics, along with compelling stories of hard-won lessons learned in the field, Harford makes a passionate case for the importance of adaptive trial-and-error....
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Hidden Agenda
- By Lawrence on 05-20-13
By: Tim Harford
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What listeners say about Melting Sun
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ryan S Chapman
- 02-28-22
Extremely Informative
I have worked in the US nuclear industry for a while and was always under the assumption that the Japanese nuclear industry worked with a similar safety-oriented mindset. It may be the case for the actual plant workers, but I was very surprised to learn of the bribery, corruption, and especially the Yakuza influence of the higher ups. It was eye opening. While the book didn't go into as much detail as I would have liked about the events at Fukushima Daiichi itself (which it sill had plenty of detail), what it did go into was told from a perspective of the people that were actually there and all of the politics involved that I don't get exposed to from the INPO and WANO reports. The preface going over the history of nuclear power in Japan really helps build up the foundation to understand how everything functions as well. It also does a great job of addressing many common misconceptions about what happened at the plant and during the aftermath of the disaster.
The author, in my opinion, does a very good job at remaining as neutral on the subject of nuclear power as possible. He is critical of TEPCO and the Japanese nuclear industry as a whole due to their corruption and lack of a decent safety culture while giving credit to them and their people when they made good decisions. I have been a fan of his work since reading Chernobyl 01:23:40 and am glad to see him making more quality content.
The narrator does a good job of explaining everything in a cadence and tone that kept my attention the entire time. He did mispronounce a couple of Japanese words, but the vast majority of them were correct and I know how hard that is to do. He even was able to get the pronunciation of a couple of commonly mispronounced French nuclear agencies correct, one of which I've been mispronouncing for years.
Overall, it is a great title and I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to learn the history of nuclear power in Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and its aftermath.
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- Gregg Karpicky
- 02-02-23
History is facts, this is most definitely not.
So many “anonymous sources”, “I believe’s” “should be’s” it reads like fiction. Half the book consists of the author being repeatedly surprised utilities place profits before safety. And (surprise surprise) he can’t wonder why regulators look the other way. I bought the book to read a history of nuclear power in Japan. I got a list of his opinions. Very, very disappointed.
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